I love this time of year! It really is the best time of the year… as we (at least those in my part of the world!) start seeing new life spring up everywhere. I have daffodils getting ready to bloom in my backyard. My kids were outside playing this afternoon! Gotta love that!

 

To celebrate the official coming of spring in the US and the UK, we bring you a sweet new blog hop, “Sweet as Spring!” Start at Design House Digital blog, and visit a bunch of blogs belonging to Design House Digital artists – designers & creative team members. At each blog, our Design House Artists will be sharing a little tip or two about their favorite hobby – scrapbooking, what else!

 

There will be a clue at each stop, and you will need to write them down and put the clues together to form a coupon code. If you follow the whole hop in order, you will be able to get a mega kit for free: “Sweet as Spring – a blog hop treasure! “

 

Twelve designers contributed a total of 67 elements, 51 papers, and 4 alpha sets , and this gorgeous kit, and the treasure is worthy of the journey. But, in addition, everyone who downloads the kit before Wednesday, March 27, will also be entered into a drawing for a $15 gift certificate to the Design House Digital shop! Wow! How’s that for awesome!

 So here’s my tip:

I took some pictures of my favorite kiddos the other day for a out of the books project… ( a wall hanging project for my living room, which I will share as soon as it’s finished, because I am so proud of it!)

I took about 50 pictures in a 15 minute span, just hoping to get a few good ones! lol My kids love to make faces at the camera, so I try to talk to them about things that make them giggle, like pizza with jelly beans, etc. Cause that’s just how I roll.

Anyway, I got some pretty good pictures, but even though the grass is starting to green up, it was still not the greatest backdrop, and of course I was trying to not take a picture of all of the other distracting things around the yard like the car, and the power pole.

So here is the picture I ended up with.

 

 

Not too bad, really. But see up in the right hand corner?? What is that I see?? Yes, people, that is my VAN!  And what I think is a grocery bag! Acck! A perfectly good picture ruined by some unsightly background! What can I do? Well, it worked out perfectly for me that I had wanted my photos to be Portrait, rather than Landscape, so I thought to myself, “self, maybe I can fix this!”

So I got out my hand-dandy tool, that every scrapbooker should know how to use! The crop tool. Now I use PSE 9 most of the time, but I am pretty confident that almost every program has this capability, so maybe you can find a way to take this tip and make it work in your program.

Now there are a couple of different ways to do this…. but I have found the method I am going to show you to be the easiest.

 

 

First get your Marquee Tool (#1 on the image above), and set it to “fixed ratio” and use whatever ratio you like (#2). I used 8×10 this time because I knew that is what I wanted to print the photos out at, but you can use 4×6 or 5×7 or what ever ratio you like.  Then click and hold, and drag your mouse across the image where you want the picture to be cropped. You can nudge the selection by using your arrow keys to get it exactly where you want it.

 

Then when you have the “marching ants” framed around the picture the way you like it, you go up to the

“Image” menu and click on “Crop.” And voila, you have a picture that has no more background yuckies, and it’s going the right way, too!

 

Here is the final image, after I used a couple of actions to brighten the image and turn it black and white. Isn’t she beautiful!? I am so excited to get these pics up on my wall!!!

 

 

So I hope you learned something from my tip today. There are lots more great tips along the way, as well as a great kit at the end!

 

We have a challenge for you, too: build something amazing of your own! Using just the Sweet as Spring collaboration kit (and your own photos, of course), create your own project and put it into our Sweet as Spring Challenge Gallery. If you post your project before April 17, you will be entered into another drawing for a $15 gift certificate to the Design House Digital shop, but the challenge gallery will remain open afterwards, and we would love to see your layouts any time.

Now, here is my letter for the coupon code: U

And now you should have collected all of the letters, so you can hop on over to the store to claim your awesome kit! Or, if you missed a stop along the way, you can use the list below to get back there!

· Design House Blog- Start here!

· Sarah Sullivan

· Vanessa Fenton

· Inkling and Wit

· Diane Rooney

· Mary Moseley

· Kristin Damon

· Imaginenation

· Courtney VanSickle

· Kandy Caballero

· Krystal Winn

· Qadirah Gomez

· Kelly Birrell

· Amy Lanham  <<You are here!>>

· Sweet as Spring – a blog hop treasure!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 20th, 2013 at 9:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.